Those Sweet Attachments

It is the second week of Lent and we are slowly but surely making our way closer to Easter and the Resurrection of our Lord! This year I decided to give up sweets (i.e. chocolate, cookies, ice cream, etc.) and limit my TV intake to at most 1 hour a day. (This second one is more to keep me from binge watching on our day off.) I've given up sweets many times before for Lent, like most of us I presume, so I didn't think I was in for that big of shock to my system. Man was I wrong. I don't think you realize just how prevalent sweets are on SPIRITUS. Whether it's donut Sunday after Mass, or someone baked brownies for Bible study, or people decide to go out for pie on Pi day, they are EVERYWHERE. In fact just today we got an e-mail that one of the SPIRITUS board members bought us a bunch of Girl Scout cookies AND other desserts that would be delivered to us one at a time over this week.... Seriously?! It also doesn't help when all you want it just a little something sweet to round off your meal. Just one Hershey Kiss that's all I ask!

While this "suffering" has been slowly torturing me, it has also been extremely humbling and eye opening. There have been sooo many times when I just feel that deep craving for chocolate but I'll have to keep telling myself no or I'll try to fill the desire with something else. This is unhealthy. This is an attachment. This is what it's like to be addicted to sin. No I'm not saying chocolate is a sin BUT when you're attached to something it is so deeply rooted in you that you don't even realize how much power you've given it. With this power it is able to change your perception of it. It no longer looks like sin but rather something normal and routine in your life. It now becomes abnormal and uncomfortable when you try to go against the sin. That is what's scariest, when sin and virtue switch places without you even noticing.

This Lent I'm working on my attachments and perceptions of these attachments. This includes the obvious attachment to sweets and TV but I'm also going even deeper. I'm trying to recognize those ideas, points of view, and ways of doing things that are so routine and normal for me but may actually be holding me back. It's when we realize what our attachments are that we can then determine why they are there and if they are healthy or not. My challenge to you this Lent is to take a look at your own attachments, reflect on them, and start detaching from the areas that are either holding you back from a greater good or are leading you into temptation and sin. By doing so you'll not only set yourself free from these things that have grown to control you but you will also be opening up a lot more room for God and the things HE wants you to be focusing on.

"Even when the goals we are aiming at are excellent in themselves, attachment to our own 'wisdom' may be a seriously bad obstacle in the way of docility to the Holy Spirit."
-Jacques Philippe, In the School of the Holy Spirit